Tom Rockmore

“What is more, in what follows we look at the capacity of the other schools to deal with some of the same problems that Marxism-Leninism considers its private preserve. The fact that the non-Marxist-Leninists deal with these problems in a non-class-bound way is in itself a response to Marxism-Leninism with its dogmatic positions on partijnost' and revolutionary spirit in philosophy. In other words, as we watch each philosophic approach proceed from normative perspectives to speculative issues and then to epistemologicallogical considerations, we see a need for communication which no one of them can avoid and which transcends the explicit or public interchange which is often the work of well-meaning but marginal representatives of these philosophic approaches. For example, there is a sense in which some "progressive" neo-Thomist advocates of dialogue with Marxism are as "Marxist" as their Marxist-Leninist interlocutors.

Philosophic debate is not political rhetoric. To the extent that what follows succeeds, it establishes the contours of a theoretical landscape, over which all of our protagonists can travel. It is our contention that these travellers—despite their varied historical situations—cannot avoid meeting, at least relative to the basic questions we evoke below.

Only the reader will be able to say whether we have provided merely further evidence as to the incompatibility of various philosophic views or a useful map of the paths across the contemporary theoretical landscape.

— Tom Rockmore et al. Marxism and Alternatives: Towarsd the Conceptual Interaction Among Soviet Philosophy, Neo-Thomism, Pragmatism, and Phenomenology (1981), pp. xiii-xiv.”
― Tom Rockmore, Marxism and Alternatives: Towards the Conceptual Interaction Among Soviet Philosophy, Neo-Thomism, Pragmatism, and Phenomenology